Black Ops Cold War is plagued with stability issues and players are losing patience

Three weeks have passed since the launch of Black Ops Cold War, and it seems that the game's poor state is nowhere near to being fixed.

While there were some complaints in regards to balance (mostly about the MP5, which was nerfed soon after) and about skill-based matchmaking (SBMM), it is not the game's balance or gameplay the player base is having a problem with.

In fact, many agree that the game is quite an enjoyable experience, that Treyarch did a fantastic job with the design, and that gameplay is mostly fun and engaging... when the game works properly.

Unfortunately, in most situations, that’s not the case.

While frustrating, Camos progression not working properly is one of the minor issues (Picture: Activision/ u/lulatheq)

Forums, Reddit, and Treyarch’s social media are flooded with desperate players reporting all kinds of issues and plea-ing for Treyarch to fix their game. The problems with Black Ops Cold War range from the annoying but relatively harmless to constant crashes, some even dangerous for the health of the consoles the game is being played on.

The most prevalent are issues with the camo progression, which are preventing players from unlocking their rewards despite being earned. While being left without your Mastery Camos is definitely a frustrating experience, there are many more alarming problems affecting players.

Reports of poor performance on good hardware and crashes are a frequent sight on the game’s forum and subreddit.

The error message players are getting when the game crashes on PC(Picture: Activision/u/PoliteBouncer)

Stability issues are not tied with any system in particular. Crashes occur on both PlayStation and Xbox, this generation and last, and on PC it is not better.

“Haven’t touched the game since it released. Crashed my Xbox One X 3 times,” says one player who goes by the name iWentRogue.

“Upgraded to a 3080 now I get this crash every game. I can't even finish a single match. This game is so trash,” shared another.

Some players are reporting that their consoles were bricked (locked and unable to use) after suffering a Black Ops Cold War crash.

“My friends Xbox One has officially been bricked after shutting off from playing BOCW,” says Reddit user SoXerxes. “My Xbox One X crashes at least twice each day I play this game too.”

Asides from crashes, PC players are reporting very poor performance even on high-end computers. It seems that performance doesn't change regardless of graphics settings. The performance issues are currently mostly reported by users with Nvidia graphics cards, but the crashes are appearing on all systems, regardless of components. 

It seems that most of these problems are coming from the game not being tested properly, and the root of that might be in how Treyarch treats their QA staff. The game's development was rocky from the beginning, and just a year before the release it was described as a total mess.

The developer Treyarch does keep track of all the known issues, but that means nothing to players if constant crashes are still being prevalent in the game, making the game practically unplayable.

The threat these issues pose to the player's experience, and for the systems on which they are playing, is something Treyarch should absolutely prioritize fixing before releasing Season 1, or otherwise, all that new content might be completely in vain.